Australian prime minister Tony Abbott talks to the governor general, Quentin Bryce, who will be the first new dame. Photograph: Mark Nolan/Getty Images

So fellow Australian subjects, what is the prime minister thinking? Is he giving the regal rude finger to republicans? Is it just because he’s the boss now, and he can, so there?

The decision to revive knights and dames of the Order of Australia was something even the staunchest of monarchists – John Howard – didn’t dare do, and he was in office for 11 years.

Sure, Tony Abbott was director of Australians for a constitutional monarchy, and he did for a while advance the concept of the Anglosphere as a thing in international relations. He was born in Britain, and he did study at Oxford, and in 2012 he did say that returning to Britain gave him a “sense of belonging”, not only because he was born there but “because our culture was” and his government does say the schools curriculum should pay more attention to western civilisation. But knights and dames?

Yes, these are technically knights and dames of the Order of Australia, which were bestowed until 1986, well after we thought we’d grown up and got rid of imperial gongs when the Whitlam government introduced Australia’s own honours system in 1975.

But the nomenclature is a throwback to a colonial past, it reeks of a system we thought we’d done away with, a system that was never really ours. Surely it says something that Edna Everage is our most famous current dame.

And the rationale behind the move is similarly regressive: the prime minister said the new gongs were needed because the existing ones recognised only “eminent” Australians while the new gongs would recognise “pre-eminent” ones. The method of selection also takes us backwards. The final decisions for other Order of Australia awards is made by the Council for the Order of Australia, on purpose, so they are not the gift of politicians. The new knights and dames of the land will be picked by the prime minister, with the chairman of the Order of Australia council merely consulted.

I’ve no issue with either of the first two recipients – outgoing governor general Quentin Bryce and her successor, Peter Cosgrove, are worthy gongees both – or with the kinds of people the prime minister said he intended to honour in the future, chief justices and chiefs of the defence force and the like.

And Abbott – who didn’t talk to either his cabinet or his party room about this big idea and who has long been a warrior for the monarchy – was clearly thoroughly enjoying this wielding of executive power. During Tuesday’s news conference he could barely disguise his grin. On Sky News, shortly afterwards, his attorney general, George Brandis, didn’t even try to. Tricky too, offering one of the first two to Bryce, who came out recently in support of a republic, and who has the opposition leader as a son-in-law.

But more than anything else, the whole bizarre episode just left the overwhelming question: surely we’ve moved past this?

And then a quick perusal of the immediate response revealed much more ridicule than outrage. Commentators were incredulous. A twitter hashtag #knightsanddames filled with knights of the round table gags, suggestions about who could be knighted and for what type of soaring public service and references to lute practice and jousting and the imminent return to imperial measurements and pounds and pence.

So maybe the answer to the question – haven’t we moved past this – might just be that while the prime minister hasn’t, most of the rest of us certainly have.